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Lauren Spierer: Pathway to disappearance: lohud recounts the last night Lauren Spierer was seen alive.

Indiana police remain tight-lipped

Bloomington police are leading an investigation into the disappearance of Indiana University sophomore Lauren Spierer but continue to keep details of their probe confidential. Early in the investigation, they released a timeline of the 20-year-old’s known movements in the hours before she went missing, including her visits to a friend’s apartment and a bar. They noted she was last reported seen about 4:30 a.m., rounding a corner toward her home at Smallwood Plaza. Police said they were questioning or seeking to question about 10 “persons of interest” but did not name those individuals or say what they learned from those interviews. They pursued potential links to slayings in the surrounding area for a possible connection to Spierer but found none. During a series of news conferences, they also spoke early on about the ongoing search efforts, and made appeals for any tips that could help solve the case. They have offered no new information since last summer.

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On the night she vanished, Lauren Spierer’s eye was starting to blacken, she had smacked her skull, lost her keys, her shoes, her cellphone and her ID, and had to be carried up the street on the back of a guy she had met just a week earlier who told friends he had designs on her.

The Indiana University sophomore staggered into a friend’s apartment under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Two buddies – Jay Rosenbaum and his neighbor Mike Beth – said they tried to put an end to a long night of partying by getting her to sleep over on one of their couches. But Spierer, despite being so inebriated or perhaps because of it, didn’t want to stop, they said. She asked Beth to come to her place for more drinks.

He refused, and Rosenbaum said he let her walk out, barefoot, alone and incoherent. That was 4:30 a.m. June 3, 2011, and that’s the last time anyone reported seeing the 20-year-old woman from Greenburgh.

One year later, police and private investigators hired by Spierer’s parents continue to scrutinize the statements and actions of friends who interacted with her before her disappearance, and they’re taking no one at their word.

“The last thing we have is her allegedly, and we use the word ‘allegedly,’ leaving that apartment,” said lead private investigator Bo Dietl, a former New York City detective whose firm has had three investigators working the case since last summer.Based on extensive interviews by the Journal News with witnesses, family members and the private investigators, a darker picture has emerged about how debilitated Spierer was that night and how common the culture of drug use and extreme drinking was in her social scene. All of it serves to make the failure of anyone to help in those final hours more glaring.

In fact, the only person who is said to have stepped in to suggest that Spierer be taken home came not from her circle of fellow classmates and close friends, some of whom she’d known since childhood summers, but a chance passerby — a tough kid, as described by one of the P.Is. — who watched her unravel and who tangled with Corey Rossman, Spierer’s companion, over her well-being.

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When Rossman, who would end up carrying Spierer through the streets of Bloomington, Ind., cursed him out for interfering, Zach Oakes punched Rossman in the face. It would not be the last time the young men who surrounded Spierer would have an angry faceoff over her.

A year after their daughter was last seen, Charlene and Robert Spierer ache with loss for the beautiful young woman they know and love who nurtured trees in Israel and aspired to work in fashion. Just recently, they acknowledged they think she is dead. And while just saying those words aloud amounts to its own painful letting go, they remain steadfast in their campaign to find out their daughter’s fate and enraged by friends they think are withholding information.

“Why don’t they do everything they possibly can to help us?” Robert Spierer asked a Journal News reporter during a recent interview in Bloomington. “What’s in their genetic makeup that allows them and their parents to separate themselves from their ability to do the right thing? I just can’t understand that.”

'Pre-game' party

Spierer, at 4-foot-11 and 94 pounds, was finishing her second year at I.U., studying fashion merchandising and living at Smallwood Plaza, an off-campus apartment less than a half-mile from Rosenbaum’s townhouse. She was a young woman with a rare heart condition, Long QT syndrome, which requires medication and can lead to fainting, seizures or potentially, sudden death.

Like many other students, she had a fake ID and enjoyed the party life in an affluent college community reputed for underage drinking and drug use.

Drugs were so prevalent in that environment that Dietl, the private investigator, said he can’t believe their use alone would be reason enough for Spierer’s friends to possibly cover something up.

“Every kid’s buying pot, cocaine, drinking, pills,” he said. “I mean, it’s all over the place. So that really can’t be the motive behind it.”

Spierer met Rosenbaum years earlier at a Jewish summer camp in Pennsylvania. It was there that she also met several other boys and girls who later would form a base of friends when she arrived at Indiana University in fall 2009. Among them was Jesse Wolff, a Long Island resident she visited at the college even before enrolling and was dating her sophomore year.

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She started the night of June 2 hanging out at Smallwood, drinking wine with friends watching the NBA playoffs.

Rosenbaum was hosting a “pre-game” party up the street, a Thursday night tradition in which students gather to drink before heading out to the bars after midnight. After he texted Spierer twice to come over, she went there with David Rohn, a friend who lived at Smallwood.

Spierer, Rohn and Rosenbaum had spent the previous weekend at the Indy 500 auto race in Indianapolis, camping out in the infield, itself a hardcore party scene. It was there that she first met Rossman, who later would tell friends that he wanted to sleep with Spierer.

Spierer and Rohn arrived at Rosenbaum’s party shortly after midnight. About a dozen people, mostly I.U. students, were there. Rosenbaum, who recalled taking six to 10 shots of Belvedere vodka, said the hard alcohol was gone by the time Spierer arrived, though there was still beer.

Rosenbaum told investigators that either Spierer or Rohn told him they’d crushed up and snorted klonopin, a drug used for seizures and panic attacks, beforehand and that he believed they’d also taken cocaine. Spierer’s family and investigators said they have no information that she consumed cocaine. The Journal News has learned that police later found a packet of the white powder in the apartment she shared with three roommates.

Ronald Chapman, a lawyer representing Rohn and Beth, did not dispute that Rohn and Spierer may have snorted klonopin that night.

Spierer stayed only briefly at the party, as the group dispersed. Rosenbaum headed with a group of them to Kilroy’s Sports Bar. Spierer went there with Rossman after stopping at his apartment two doors away.

They spent at least an hour at the bar, where Spierer took off her shoes to enjoy the sand-covered patio. She also put down her cellphone, and ended up leaving her shoes and phone behind when she and Rossman left shortly before 3 a.m.

'She's OK, I got it'

The two walked to Smallwood. They were in her fifth-floor hallway when they were confronted by four male students who got off the elevator and saw that Spierer appeared unsteady.

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“Are you OK?” one of the guys recalled asking her.

“She’s OK, I got it,” Rossman is said to have replied.

“Hey dude, you’d better take her to her room,” the guy shot back.

Rossman started cursing, and Zach Oakes, the burliest of the bunch, punched him in the chin, knocking him to the tile floor.

Rossman later would say, through his lawyer, that he was punched so hard that he lost memory of the rest of the night and the 15 minutes before he got clocked.

However, after they took the elevator down to the lobby, video shows Spierer stumbling across the floor, and Rossman helping her to her feet and out of the building.

On the next block, she sat down on a staircase and fell backward, slamming her head on the concrete step. The thud was loud enough for a young woman to hear it and ask whether she was all right.

According to the woman, Rossman replied, “She’s OK, I’ll take care of it.”

As Rossman and Spierer continued up the street, she fell hard and didn’t raise her hands to cushion the blow as her face hit the ground. A few steps later, she fell again.

They then ducked into an apartment complex, called 10th & College, and knocked on the door of four female students who were at the party earlier. No one answered, and they left. At this point, Rossman had Spierer slung across his back and was carrying her.

She later would drop her keys and student ID card before the two crossed a rocky lot to his apartment. “It was a combination of her staggering, him pulling and carrying her,” investigator Mike Ciravolo said.

Spierer won't stay

At Rossman’s apartment, Beth, his neighbor, was still awake; he’d been drinking and finishing a paper for class.

Rossman stumbled, vomiting on the carpet as he walked upstairs. That’s when Beth said he escorted him to bed. He then returned to the living room, where he said he tried to persuade Spierer to sleep over. But Spierer said she wanted to return to Smallwood, wrongly believing she left her phone with Rohn.

Beth said he then phoned his neighbor, Rosenbaum, the host of the “pre-game” party who knew Spierer from their camp days, wanting him to take care of her.

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“Mike Beth says, ‘I don’t know her as well as Jay Rosenbaum knows her,’ ” said Ciravolo, whose firm interviewed Beth. “So he walks her next door, and he makes her Jay Rosenbaum’s problem.”

Rosenbaum, who said he was home getting ready for bed at the time, told investigators that he received the call about 3:30 a.m. He said Beth told him that Spierer was drunk and yet trying to get him to join her at Smallwood for more drinking.

They came over together, and Rosenbaum said he put on sweatclothes and opened the door. Spierer came carrying her fake ID and Smallwood key card, he said. “When Lauren walked into Rosenbaum’s apartment, he observed a very noticeable bruise under her eye,” the investigator wrote in a report summarizing his interview with Rosenbaum. “He stated he asked her what happened, and she responded, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Beth said he pressed her to sleep over at Rosenbaum’s. Initially, she sat on the couch and seemed agreeable, he said. Beth said that’s when he left Rosenbaum’s and returned to his apartment.

At Rosenbaum’s, Spierer picked up an iPod on a counter and mistook it for a cellphone, he said.

In the half-hour before she purportedly left, two calls were placed from Rosenbaum’s phone. Rosenbaum said Spierer placed both calls, one to Rohn and another to a male friend who also was with her earlier that night watching basketball at Smallwood.

Both were sleeping, neither picked up, and no messages were left.

Rosenbaum said he finally let Spierer leave after she demonstrated she could walk without stumbling.

As she was walking away, he said, he urged her again to stay, then told her to text him if she retrieved her phone. He said he then walked up to his second-floor balcony and watched her walk toward College Avenue, the route that would have taken her home.

There is no camera that would have captured her leaving their apartment building. If she turned onto College, she would have had to walk 100 yards until she passed a working surveillance camera. Coincidentally, the camera, which did not capture an image of her walking home, is attached to the law offices of Carl Salzmann, who was retained by Rossman a couple days after Spierer’s disappearance.

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Wolff, friends feud

The private investigators say they remain focused on all of those young men and the roles they played in Spierer’s last known hours. They’re also eyeing Jesse Wolff, who told friends he had planned to get together with his girlfriend that morning but went to sleep because he couldn’t get in touch with Spierer.

Wolff, who lived within a cluster of homes occupied by a fraternity that had been banned from campus, said he spent his night watching basketball at one of the houses. A housemate told investigators that he and Wolff went to sleep in their separate bedrooms at 2:30 a.m., after watching the game and smoking marijuana.

That afternoon, Wolff was the one who drove to the police station to report her disappearance, a couple hours after Kilroy’s called him after finding Spierer’s phone and seeing that he had contacted her.

As news of the disappearance spread, hundreds of volunteers began scouring the city in a widening search for the missing student. But out of public view, Wolff was feuding with Rossman and Rosenbaum.

Just days after the disappearance, Wolff and his father barged into Rossman and Beth’s apartment, investigators learned.

Jesse Wolff was confrontational, and Beth said he broke up a potential fight.

“I hope you rot in jail!” Wolff is said to have shouted as he left.

At a football tailgate party in early September after everyone but Spierer was back at school, Rosenbaum said, Wolff had a frat buddy named Mark come over to threaten that Wolff would punch him in the face if he didn’t leave right away.

Rosenbaum said he left to avoid conflict.

The Spierers’ private detectives, who have interviewed more than 100 people, have questioned nearly all of the “persons of interest” since they were hired by the family, with the exception of Rossman.

But they’re not satisfied with the ones who have talked. All of them have retained lawyers.

“A lot of those stories don’t line up, and there’s a lot of conflicting statements,” Dietl said. “Absolutely they were holding back information.”

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Lawyers for Beth, Rohn and Rosenbaum said their clients have cooperated with police and the private investigators, and that all of them have passed private lie-detector tests.

“They’ve been interviewed and interviewed and interviewed, and to say they’ve been less than forthcoming is just not accurate,” said Chapman, who represents Beth and Rohn.

Jen Lukemeyer, Rosenbaum’s lawyer, said her client has been unfairly “crucified as a bad guy,” but that his only real mistake was letting Spierer walk out.

“Retrospectively, he would have done anything to get her to stay,” Lukemeyer said.

Lawyers for Rossman and Wolff did not return calls seeking comment.

Bloomington police said early in the investigation that only one person voluntarily came forward with information. They have not updated their statement, nor shared any new details about the case since last summer. For the anniversary, police issued a news release Thursday stating that their investigation remains a priority and is “very active,” with two to three credible tips coming in weekly.

“We made a point early on that we would not discuss people, evidence or the investigatory plan,” Capt. Joe Qualters told the paper. “I’m in no position to refute or verify anything.”

'Man up'

Dietl had strong words, in particular, for Wolff.

“Jesse, he’s supposedly the boyfriend,” Dietl said. “I don’t get the idea of him bringing in a lawyer right away. This to me is a very creepy thing that this kid didn’t step up and say, ‘Hey, I cared about this girl, this is my girlfriend.’ Why wouldn’t you be cooperating 100 percent with police? Why would you hire a lawyer unless you were hiding something? Man up.”

He and the Spierer family are calling on all of the young men to step out from behind their lawyers to disclose everything they know and submit to lie-detector tests administered by police.

“I don’t trust people who want to help, but then all of a sudden subsequently retain attorneys to protect themselves,” Dietl said. “It makes me suspect they’re trying to cover something up.”

“Somebody knows something,” he continued. “Maybe one of the three boys, maybe the boyfriend. Get a conscience. Step forward to clear their conscience.”